What a disappointment.
That’s all I can think of regarding the new rendition of the novel It, originally written by the one and only Stephen King.
The new rendition was released Sept. 8, with a budget of 35 million dollars. The film was directed by Andres Muschietti and produced by Seth Grahame-Smith, Barbara Muschietti, Dan Lin, Roy Lee and David Katzenberg. And the starring role of Pennywise was casted to Bill Skarsgard.
I first found about the second rendition of the novel last spring, and instantly I was ecstatic. One of my fondest childhood memories was watching the original 90’s film with my dad and laughing at the sub par effects and the humorous acting, so naturally when I was scrolling through YouTube one night and looked at the #1 trending video and saw it was the new It trailer—I screamed (and not in horror, but excitement).
I watched the numerous released trailers repeatedly, memorizing each scene and each shot type, amazed at the quality compared to the previous film. Every week I would remind my dad to book the tickets as soon as they opened, so we could go to the midnight viewing. But as the date approached, something seemed off to me.
I noticed that the new Pennywise, that had been reappearing in my dreams time and time again form the short snaps I saw of him in the trailers, was not all that scary—and more humorous looking. And it seemed to me that every new trailer they released, revealed another one of the countless jump scares within the movie itself. It was almost as if I didn’t even need to go and see the movie anymore, because the trailers revealed everything “scary” in the movie, and boy was I right.
The movie itself was predictable and funny—which should not be a trait of a HORROR movie. Even though I watched the trailers multiple times, each scene was overly predictable. First the little boy dies, kids bully each other, a group of losers become friends, the group goes searching for the boy, they get haunted by a clown and they go down to the sewer where the clown eventually slips away. Even my mom, who never watched the 90’s version or read the book, knew exactly what was going to happen every few minutes.
Second, the clown was not scary at all. As I predicted from the trailers, Pennywise was a character you could laugh at, which is not supposed to be the case. His voice was too high pitched to be frightening and the dialogue was childish and dumb. His body shape was too lean and tall to be scary as well. And his smile was the most frustrating aspect. It did no justice to the iconic menacing grin Tim Curry created for Pennywise. The new clown just seemed pathetic to me compared to the icon of Curry himself.
Third, as I mentioned before, is that all the important jump scares were released in the trailers. It really wasn’t even necessary for me to go and see the movie considering that they revealed the entire movie’s sequence over the trailers. Something interesting my friend said to me after us both seeing the movie was that, “using jump scares in a scary movie is cheating. A real horror movie should be scary from more deeper reasons”—so according to her definition, It shouldn’t even be really considered a horror film considering they used jump scares to bring the fear to the movie.
Fourth, and to me the most important, is that the staff of the modern rendition cut out some of the most iconic scenes of 90’s film. Where was the shower scene— which to me was the BEST scene of the 90’s movie. If you don’t know what that is, it’s when Eddie is forced to take a shower in school and all the shower heads stretch out and try to attack him and then Pennywise shows up. Where was that scene?? Also, the scene with Beverley and the blood that comes from the sink, why did they need to cover the entire room from head to toe with “blood”. I put blood in quotations because the substance they used as blood literally looked like red paint. Whoever was on props needed to be fired. And why did they cover the entire room in blood? That’s so fake. Everything was just so boring and so unrealistic, it was almost frustrating to watch.
The only thing that may have saved the movie (but nothing could really save it unfortunately) was the actors. The actors were phenomenal. The kids of the cast really took on the roles and resembled real 80’s kids and I truly appreciated that. So, credits are due to Finn Wolfhard, Sophia Lillis, Jaeden Lieberher, Jack Dylan Grazer, Wyatt Oleff, Chosen Jacobs and Nicholas Hamilton.
But unfortunately, I just don’t see myself going back to see the second part—Oh yeah did I mention that there is a “part 2”? How classic of Hollywood to stretch out a movie that did not need to be stretched out. This was supposed to be the movie to save the summer film season of 2017, but from my standpoint, this only further proves that 2017 was a rough movie year.